skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some important points on this subject.

First, the 1st stage has redundancy against engine failures however the 2nd stage (which uses largely the same engine as in the 1st stage) has only one engine. So if the per-engine failure rate is too high that could spell bad news for overall vehicle reliability even if the launcher can survive 1st stage engine failures remarkably well. Some reasons to be optimistic: 2nd stage engines have much lower aerodynamic loading and don't have to operate through "max-Q" as the 1st stage engines do (which was incidentally the point in time that the engine failure on this flight happened).

Second, the Falcon 9's 1st stage engines are arranged in a 3x3 grid which seems to result in some unfavorable aerodynamic forces on the engines on the corners. It's possible that this contributed to the engine failure (which occurred in a corner engine) and it's also possible that it contributed to the destruction of the engine fairing after it was shut-down.

Third, the particular engine in use on this vehicle (the Merlin-1C) will only be used on one more flight before being replaced (in the Falcon 9 v1.1) with substantially redesigned Merlin-1D engines (in both the 1st and 2nd stages). Additionally, the engine arrangement on the first stage will change to be octagonal, radially symmetric instead of a grid.

It's good to know the systems and structures to protect against 1st stage engine failure work well, however a lot of the reliability analysis up to this point is somewhat obsoleted by the imminent change in design. I suspect that the engine layout and upgrade will lead to greater overall reliability, but it will take several flights to prove that.

Anyway, some things to chew on.
In the context of this discussion (and indeed as reflects how most people invest), wouldn't it be more relevant to see the average rate of return assuming regular (inflation or income growth adjusted) annual investments?
There was an interesting bit of industrial espionage intrigue around the 555, a story he told friends and family many times.

As he mentions in his book "Designing Analog Chips" he was at one point stuck on a design that required 9 pins, and that forced it into a 14 pin package. He initially submitted this design to Signetics and it was this design that someone in the company leaked to a competitor.

But the larger package bugged him and he kept at it until he was able to get it down to 8 pins which allowed an 8-pin package, much preferable over a 14 pin one. The competitors, unaware of the improved design, came out with the larger 14-pin package and this gave Signetics a significant edge when they started selling the 555.
Map of connections of all Seattle bands
Widlar's been gone 20 years, now he was a guy who packed 2000 years equivalent of wild heroic living

Never heard of him but now you got me curious. Do tell more.
I suppose Huawei will then stand to lose a lot of customer loyalty?
People will give you huge lists which will disorient more than they help. Let me give you a very short list:

1. Learn more about your customers by getting out and talking to them. Most engineers are deathly afraid do that, and many are not even technically able to do so, living in other countries or just not having the access. Thus you will have a big avantage over them.

2. Force yourself to learn to work in teams. This will push you to go against the typical lone-wolf attitude, but cohesive teams always win. without exception.

3. Learn to appreciate people who have complimentary expertise. Most engineers prefer to stick with their own kind, which creates very lopsided teams.

Ignoring these three factors dooms 99% of engineers out there to a life of being merely average, and if you make the best of all three you will be in the 1%, the exceptional engineer.
Samsungs is appealing based on the foreman's personal ties to Seagate. That's why all this stuff is being talked about now.

(He didn't disclose during jury selection that he had been involved in a lawsuit against Seagate, which is primarily owned by Samsung.)
I think it is related to Benford's law in that they are both a manifestation of the fact that a log scale is the most natural (most uninformative, highest entropy) distribution (or prior) for things that have magnitude (having a parameter that can't go into the negatives such as height or length or volume as opposed to a positional parameter which can be negative).

I do believe this is a property of the universe and not just a psychological phenomenon. Our mind here is simply following the natural distribution and Benford's law is just the observed manifestation of this pattern.

This type of pattern is not odd if you are believer in the Bayesian interpretation of probability theory. The shape of Benford's distribution follows the shape of a maximum entropy, most uninformative distributions for a value of magnitude (as I mentioned, positions do not follow benford's law).

Take street lengths for example. Assuming that they follow a log prior simply means that for a length of street L, if you pick another random street, you are as likely to pick a street within the length range L/2 to L than L to 2*L. From the original street length, to get a street twice as short, you need to subtract much less than you would have to add to get a street twice as long. That is why this distribution is not linear or rather it is linear on the multiplication and division operation, not on additions or subtractions.

If instead you'd assume that a street x meter longer is as likely as a street x meter shorter you would end up with impossible probabilities. For example, for a street of 1 km, a 3 kilometer street would be as likely as a -1km street? Even if you'd assume probabilities were equal for all lengths between 0 and infinity that would mean you think there are as many streets measuring a tredecillion billion km long as there are street 5 km long. This is simply not how things are sized in the universe. Smaller things are in greater numbers. Log priors are one of these areas where the math predicts the universe logically and the universe is mirrored by the math beautifully iff you do your calculations properly (using Bayesianity). It seems evolution has made our psychology reflect this reality.
There is a difference between planned and anticipated.
I'm not an expert but I've heard it also has something to do with age. Older content has more google juice.
Its a lot of data to comprehend. Doing operations on a large cluster architecture has a similar issue which is that there are many things that can go wrong and are 'ok' because the system is designed to deal with it seamlessly. But I'm a big fan of tools that let you have a red/yellow/green indication of nominal/warn/fail for each sub system. Looking at such a display you can comprehend the entire system is 'ok' (or not).
Thank goodness B-trees are considered the most-advanced of the data structure knowledge. My com sci classes never did a great job of making those applicable.
Glad to see the interest in this new form of market research. YC S12 company Survata.com offers a similar service.
We can run multiple questions at a time, so researchers enjoy the ability to cross-tab responses (an important ability you lose when you run only 1 question surveys on other services).
We encourage you to check us out at Survata.com (we give all first time users a $10 coupon) and we welcome any feedback.
Gittip + GitHub For Project Royalties
You may be interested in this:

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3071

It's index intersection, and it's scheduled for 2.3.1 which is the next next dev release. I'm hoping it makes it in for 2.4.
Tulip 4.0
Not really. What problem are you trying to solve and what are the benefits to me? This is a much better splash page but the copy is still pretty bad - https://www.workio.com/about/
This might be the most delicious piece of code ever written ( I cannot judge that, really), but we're talking 2307 lines for a string comparison.

I'm impressed, but also scared and amused. I always look with envy at system level guys, lacking the knowledge to play on that level. This, though, comforts me quite a bit. That's just not my definition of 'fun'.
That's exactly what I was thinking - "Yeah, but they had Jamerson". Today Motown is primarily remembered for its stars and craftsmen.

However, what attracted all those musicians was a working system and that was put in place by some very creative businessmen. And in a lot of ways it's the exact opposite of what we read about here on HN, which is "throw something out there fast to create traction and then grow from there." At Motown is was a centrally planned and fully encapsulated process.
Tried it. It works great! :)
From the article:

Normal – 44.5%
Italic – 44.9%
Bold – 45%
Bold Italic – 43.8%

[...]

Whilst Bold did the best I’m not convinced that it’s
something that it worth investigating further with that
page.

I feel like the author has a weak statistical background, which is unfortunate when running a site that is, essentially, all about applying statistical tests. The difference between Italic and Bold is basically indistinguishable without a sample size of a few hundred thousand.

Even telling Bold Italic and Bold apart reliably (i.e. lying outside each others approximate 95% confidence intervals) requires a sample size of more than 6000.

(Admittedly, my statistics isn't awesome, and it's late here.)

(Also, www.quicklytest.it and quicklytest.it are acting differently. Specifically, the former is saying "The requested URL <url> was not found on this server." for every request.)
Here is an older version of the homepage: https://skitch.com/lucahammer/eagkm/workio-hompage-old
凄い！
Sure, but in no point in the pursuit of a PhD in theoretical physics did I actually use any of that machinery. Nor did it ever come up in any papers I've read, nor any talk I've seen.

The point is this -- if you want to extend our model of the universe, knowing the more abstract machinery is useful; by generalising your understanding (and a hell of a lot of math is basically generalising to more abstract systems) you gain insight into how alternative models might be constructed. If you want to understand our current model, even at a quite deep level, you can get by without knowing any topology at all.
I still found it every confusing, the main thing is:

Why is it a document editor? It's just asking a question yet I can edit a whole bunch of stuff for no reason.

Also, I don't think having the main navigation buttons in a small box in the top right works.
What if this is specifically intended to be a tablet-only user experience? Suddenly it makes sense.
>You can find silly faults with individual examples all you want, but studies indicate that people have a tendency to think percentage-based about savings rather than absolute terms.

Which sounds like the smart way to go about it.

It seems a little illogical in the chocolate vs laptop $.50 off voucher, but it too makes sense. The laptop voucher provides almost no value to you, considering you are about to spent $700 dollars on the thing anyway. $.50 could be just the gas to go to the store to buy it.

$.50 for the chocolate on the other hand, will be taken only by cash strapped people (or coupon maniacs).

I doubt people with $700 at the ready to buy a laptop would at the same time clip a $.50 coupon for a chocolate bar.
Monopolist Regulation Behind Wikiweapon 3D Printer Repossession
A way might be to simply limit the number of topics and industries a person can list, though that has its own downsides.

Just thinking of my own case, you won't get much of use from Facebook (I post pictures of kittens and cookie recipes), twitter (It's been nearly a year since I've tweeted anything) or Linkedin (I barely use it). You'd get more of use from HN, reddit or (especially) github, but it might be harder to extract useful information from those sources.
25% market share isn't 'the definition' of a monopoly in the UK, as far as I'm aware (IANAL or in any way an expert in this).

It's one of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for the OFT to refer a merger to the Competition Commission for investigation under the Enterprise Act[1], if the result would have greater than 25% market share. The other main conditions being that it believes the result would be "a lessening of competition", that it's an important market, etc. That doesn't suddenly make every company with >25% market share a monopoly.

The nearest I can find for the definition of a monopoly, for the purposes of investigating a company on its own (rather than a merger) is "a dominant position in a market"[2], the wording imported from Article 102 TFEU[3].

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/40

[2] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/41

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_102_of_the_Treaty_on_th...
Sure, I have no status, and I have no demands. What I like to do is to distinguish between people who can program and people who just can talk, to form my opinion on what I'm reading. Words are cheap.
So with a top speed of 2,300-3,000 mph and a range of 1,000 miles, it could sustain top speed for what, 20-25 minutes, assuming no fuel required to achieve altitude or for landing?

It's hard to imagine the mission profile such a vehicle would fit.

...other than doing a short-range, high-speed insertion of a bomb delivered from high altitude. In the 1950s. Oh, nevermind.
So, to agree to their terms we need to digitally click a button that says that we accept their 90 pages of terms and conditions, and for them to accept our disapproval we need to give them our signature on a physical piece of paper that they receive by snail mail.

I have half a mind to personally fund people opting-out, just to prove a point.

We need an free app for touch devices that allows people to easily opt-out, we collect people's opt-outs, run a kick starter campaign to fund the app and postage, and a reddit campaign to go viral.

Then we print all of the opt-outs and mail them all in crates to PayPal with "FAO: Fuck You" written on the side.

Anyone up for this?
If I say "I'm going to analyze your traits and habits, and model your personality relative to those similar to you", I've observed that most people would tentatively agree to the process.

However, if I say "I'm going to group you with your stereotype", most people become rebellious or contrary.

"Stereotype" seems like a hot-button keyword. We react to the term, not to the concept behind it. Why?
4.5 is halfway between 0 and 9. Halfway between 1 and 9 is 1+(9-1)/2 = 5
Interesting chart.

Strange, at one point it says "High inlfation led to negative returns". When money is worth less, then you get more money when you sell something. In this case your share of a company. So why would the returns of investing in the S&P be affected by inflation?
They said the engine fairing ruptured. That is most definitely mechanical damage.
What differentiates this from Dropbox and Box.net, etc., aside from the amount of space available? What makes this a superior solution rather than just yet another undifferentiated solution?
Haven't rofled so hard in a long time. Thanks for that.
Astronaut screams for nine minutes 
Howard mentioned that we can see a video on YouTube with him screaming for nine minutes. Well ...
> He also said his statement "This is never about what runs fastest...".

This style has nothing to do with running fast, it has to do with lowering the cognitive load of the rest of the function. A branch means you have two states to keep in mind (the state where the branch is taken, and the state where the branch is not taken). Without early exit, you have to keep both states in mind until the end of the function just in case.

With guard clauses, you can discard on of the states (the one which matched the clause) entirely.
The numbers come from around 10,000 visitors.

Mmm, I'll take a look at the www. now!
Show HN: I made a site that shows you the best songs by any artist
http://www.theirbestsongs.com

Looking for feedback, suggestions, and direction on where to go with this :)
We want to streamline work processes. If you need something done you have to find someone who is able to do it and has time. work.io takes care of this. You define what you need, say how much you want to pay and get the results. You don't need to interact with the providers. Less overhead and better results are your benefits.
I think far more likely, they thought "Saucer? How would that even fly? But wait, what if it was spinning really fast? Hmm... let me get my slide rule...".
Zoelle from Crocodoc here. I completely agree with your assessment. Our goal here is to explore what's possible from a technical standpoint using SVG — we don't mean to suggest that this page flip interaction should actually be used when reading documents!
Day in the Life of a Yelp Engineer
A new way to Send money to friends and family overseas (via SMS)
Here's a new way to send money to someone overseas. Check it out and tell us what you think. Oh, and Paypal takes care of the security coz our budget was a bit short for the SSL certificate...
Maybe a donation to one of our specials will help us protect the site better. But no pressure...lol.
You might want to lookup the term "de-facto standard":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto_standard
Thank you I enabled http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-green-cache/
Maybe it's the engineer in me, maybe it's the astronomy geek who watched two shuttles explode.

But I am way more impressed with "engine failed, still got to orbit safely" than I was with the already titanic feat of making it to orbit in the first place.
Ask HN: How to avoid "that bootstrap look"?
I, like many other developers, really like Twitter's bootstrap framework. However, many of the websites using it look the same or similar (those buttons, that navbar at the top, amongst others). What are a ways to differentiate your website without needing to break out CSS power tools (Acknowledged, design is fundamentally important, but regardless, I am a hacker)
This is what I understand 1 minute after perusing your website.

1 - This is some sort of a marketplace where you can buy and sell expertise. Kinda like a Air bnb for odd jobs. Reminds me of a similar startup that tried that, but I cannot remember their name.

2 - The landing page's layout is a little confusing. I clicked on a couple of links and landed on your about page[1]. When you have a 90 second video explaining what your product is, why would you not put that on a landing page ? The call to action would be very easy for me. Click on the video and know more about you.

3 - Although you meant for people to click sign-in on the landing page, that action was not very obvious to me. You should look to prioritize 'Sign-up' not sign in. The fact that they are both green buttons that look alike does not help.

4 - Your key customer sign-up categories appear to be a buyer who gets services and a seller who markets his / her services. You might want to streamline signups to reflect that.

5 - The text overlay on the image is not very visible / readable. Have you considered switching the images to color on mouse-over ?

6 - Where is the submit button for 'Suggest a feature' under watercooler ?

7 - I don't quite get the watercooler part. Is it meant for users to share insights and that becomes part of the news ?

8 - What is your pricing ? Where can I see what cut you take and what I get in return ? What are people signing up for ?

9 - When I sign up, its not very clear to me that something happened on the screen. Its great that I am logged in, but the UI needs to do more to inform me about what just happened.

10 - A short tutorial on signing up would be great. The app asked me to add funds and I don't understand what for.

I like the idea. The presentation and the user flow could use a little work. Gather the feedback you get here and fine tune your site. Nice work.

[1] - https://www.workio.com/about/
Win a Playstation Vita
Nu-uh. By that math, halfway between 1 and 2 is.... 1?!
Could you please explain how you will address:

* quality: How do I know the quality of the work will be good? What happens in the case of disputes?

* reputation: How will you keep track of reputation of the workers? Odesk, Vworker, Ebay are marketplaces that do a decent job at filtering out spammers and bad guys. Where they lack is determining the difference between good and great. Everyone gets FIVE STARS or close to it for every job, unless it's completely bungled. This also creates a perverse pressure on the contractor. If an employer complains about the contractor publicly, the contractor quickly lose all work. Workers are thus pressured to satisfy out-of-scope employer demands so they get a five star rating and maintain their sterling reputation.
Double The Effectiveness of Ecommerce Newsletters
Keep in mind that LLC filing vs C/S corps varies per state. In the great state of New York, it's a real pain to create an LLC. I believe you have to run a publication in trade magazines for your industry, selected by the state. Of course... it's New York state and they are an infuriating state gov't to work with.
I can't get the pager flip to go all the way over. I am using Windows 7/Chrome and clicking/dragging the bottom corner. I can't get the first page to go past the paperclip. I feel silly asking, but what am I doing wrong?
Perhaps also worth mentioning is that the proposed launch abort system is supposed to work at any point of the mission. An engine failure in the second stage would in theory not be a death-sentence to anyone who happens to be riding.
Those ambiguities make no difference to the answer. Answering 4.5 just means you forgot that starting a count from 0 gives a different total than starting from 1.
Install and Configure a Database Server in under 15 minutes
Some time ago, Google released http://www.20thingsilearned.com and the source -> http://code.google.com/p/20thingsilearned/
>I don't want to be an asshole who just criticizes, but really? It's the best W3C, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Facebook, HP, Adobe, Nokia and Opera could come up with?

No, it's the best a small team, sponsored by those companies, but having nothing to do with them --it's not like Google or Adobe or MS assigned their best engineers to the new site-- could come up with as an ALPHA release, and in a short period of time.

Isn't it OBVIOUS?
At the risk of wading into a pointless flame war, let's apply Occam's Razor.

First, public belief/interest in alien flying saucers has been mostly dead for decades. Performing a cover-up operation now would accomplish nothing.

Second, if the original flying saucer sightings truly were of extraterrestrial spacecraft (which I highly doubt) then nothing in these documents precludes these designs being based on those spacecraft. So, I expect this release to fuel the flames of the conspiracy theories, not cool them down.
This is cool from a programming perspective but it is poor UX. I believe everyone on HN knows this but the problem area are my clients. They run across stuff like this and think it looks cool/fun. Instead of listening to reason they demand stuff like this and end up with bad websites because all I can do it advise them but then make what they want.

Please stop spreading bad UX, leave page flipping to actual pages/paper.
Can't wait to see CSS Shaders land, then we can do this and correctly deform the HTML to make it look like it is on the "paper" (instead of being clipped to the paper). Still, with the curves they use it looks pretty good as is.

It's nice to see the web platform is capable of effects like this and I think the "usability" complaints in other comments are lame. You could use this to hide controls underneath a UI (ala Maps on iOS), for example (though maybe if you're "zen of palm"ing it you'd rather minimize clicks and put buttons everywhere, your choice); it doesn't have to replace scrolling.
The US government seems to be quite ready to try out a lot of fringe stuff if it provides military applications (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project). They may as well just have gotten their inspiration from the general flying saucer hype.